Small space living hacks for tiny homes

As I’ve mentioned pretty freely on this blog, we live in a mobile home. It’s a small two bedroom, and under 450 square feet. That means there’s not a huge amount of space, so we have to smart with our space and what we do with it.

Living in such a small amount of space means we have to be really particular with what furniture we have and where and how we store things. It can easily become messy and cluttered, and we try to avoid that as much as possible!

Small space living hacks

Smart furniture

As furniture is the biggest thing that goes into the room, we’re very particular with what we have. The sofa we had – the standard built-in one that came with the mobile home- took up three walls, and left very little space in the living room. We took it out and are currently choosing a sofa to buy, but we know it needs to have storage, and preferably be a sofa bed. I actually have my eye on this one from Ikea.

We also removed the dinning table that came with the mobile home. I was a normal table, and sat 6 people. It would have been a very nice table, had we of had more space. We’re replacing that too, hopefully with this one. We’ve seen this table in action before at a friends house, and it’s perfect for us and our needs.

Clever storage & organization

This is another big factor in living in a small space, storage. This mobile home wasn’t made with the thought of people living in it permanently. It’s a holiday mobile home, with the thought of you bringing a suitcase, not an entire house.

We’re using the space under the bed, everything has a place, and our spare room is currently full of boxes and decorating stuff – all organized – waiting to be emptied. Instead of emptying everything at once and decorating all at once, we’re taking a slower approach. Bits are getting done week by week, and as we’re not using the spare room it’s the best place to put things right now.

Do the most important stuff first

There’s A LOT we want to do, but we’re putting some stuff off until next year as we definitely don’t have the funds to do it all at once. If it’s not necessary to live comfortably this winter, it can wait.

For example, we’re resealing around the windows, doors, vents, and skylight vents. That will put us back quite a bit, as EVERYTHING needs doing, inside and out. Making sure the mobile home is warm for winter is more important than painting the kitchen cabinets.

We’re also concentrating on getting storage that works for us in the living room. Right now there is a small corner desk and and small two shelf unit in one corner, where the TV is sat. We’re going to change that, and move the TV over to the half wall, and make that corner into a full shelving unit. This way we actually have space for all our books, CDs and DVDs and they’re not piled up in a corner.

Don’t keep clutter or what doesn’t fit

This is something we learnt the hard way! We only had two days between seeing the accommodation and moving in, so I had no time to go through our boxes again. Once we started unpacking, I was ruthless with every single thing that came out each box.

Don’t try to cram everything into a small space, it makes it look messy at best and can quickly become a nuisance.

Condense what you do have

If there are things you just don’t want to part with, condense it as much as possible. Most of our CD’s for example are in CD boxes and I’ve put some in CD/DVD wallets. Getting rid of the cases might be blasphemy to some, but it’s condensed our 100+ DVDs and even more CDs into half the space they’d normally take up. Which is a blessing, as I can’t do the same with our books!

Have you got any tips for living in a small space? Let us know down below!